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Google Launches WordPress Plugin For AdSense And Webmaster Tools

Google has released a new plugin for publishers using WordPress. The official Google Publisher Plugin offers support for Google AdSense and Google Webmaster Tools, with more services likely to be added in the future.

This is a beta release, so as an early adopter, you’re also a test case. Google said in the release announcement, “We’re still fine-tuning the plugin to make sure it works well on the many WordPress sites out there. We’d love for you to try it now and share your feedback on how it works for your site.”

By allowing publishers to link their WordPress sites to their AdSense accounts, the plugin is designed to make getting ads up and running easier and eliminate the need for manual HTML modifications.

As you can see in the screenshot from Google below, once the plugin is installed, you just need to click on one of the plus signs to add an ad unit to the page.

After clicking on a placement, you can change the ad settings and preview what an example ad will look like alongside the content.

The Webmaster Tools support just allows you to verify your site “with just one click” if you haven’t already done so.

Note that the plugin cannot be used on sites hosted on WordPress.com at this point.

So far, the plugin has been downloaded just under 3,000 times in the past week and received 4.3 out of 5 star rating. You can download it here.

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About The Author

As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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http://www.keshkesh.com/ Takeshi Young

Ahh, disappointed the Webmaster portion of the plugin doesn’t do more. I was expecting access to WMT data from within the WordPress dashboard.

http://www.jackhumphrey.com/ JackHumphrey

Seriously? Not terribly exciting and not fooled by the webmaster tools function, which can only be seen as a Trojan Horse to deliver the real goal: making it easier to get more ad exposure across the 18% of the web that runs on WordPress. There are already SEO plugins that have made it easier to plug into Webmaster Tools and they’ve been around for a long time. This is a play for more ad real estate and nothing more. Love Google to death, but this isn’t one of the reasons – not by a long shot.

Jon Hogg

Well yeah, it is the Adsense plugin – surprised it’s about making it easier to create ads?!

http://www.jackhumphrey.com/ JackHumphrey

I sat a 3 month baby in front of a laptop and he was able to set up Adsense on WordPress in under 5 minutes just fine the way it was. So yeah, kind of surprised they had to make a plugin.